Since I have a lot of items in my shop I often struggle with some problems on the user interface:
1) Material handling is so time consuming.
At least a button which adds all material as restriction would help. Deleting the items is much faster.

2) Item status
I would prefer an item status which can be handled by the [shop owner. For example a list of attributes which can be given to the item and is also visible in the gallery.
For example: Preview - Tested - Changed - Top Seller ....
Since that is shop specific the attribute list has to be handled by the shop owner. For the gallery small icons which show these stati would be nice.

3) Gallery picture default view
Changing the view direction of the gallery picture.
Currently you get a default view. But often this view is not very accurate. Maybe there could be a button in 3d view which generates a new default picture out from the current view angles.

4) 3d file names.
It would help me a lot when I can see which 3d file name has been uploaded the last time. Currently I see the version and the date which helps a lot.

5) Shop owners pricing advantages
Shop owners do a lot of work, whcih results in earnings for shapeways. For this there should be a price reduction for us. At least the first order of a piece (which is often a test to make it public) should be reduced.
Or you offer price reduction tickets for shop owners.

6) List view
A list view for all items where changes can be easily done would help a lot. Iteration through all the items needs so much time.
I'm still not done with the material updates.

I'll look into the material restrictions. I was not aware that this was time consuming. How long does it take you per model?

The status is an interesting idea. Would a tag work? A category? Where would you want this status displayed? How prominently?

With regards to 3, I think that may be complicated to do. With what percentage of your models are you unhappy with? Would you find this a fun thing to have or essential?

4, will look into that.

5. At the moment I don't really see a way how to reduce prices only for Shop owners. And I'm not sure this is fair. What if someone just does not want to sell on Shapeways but does a lot of work helping people on the forum, should that person not get a discount? And how to stop someone from just opening a Shop to get the discount?

1. I tested that for an actual model and it took more then 50 seconds (!) to do.

Maybe a user default would also handle this easily.

2. Status:

3. Take a look at the picture of the Brit Grenadier. This picture would attract no buyer.

5. I mainly raised this question because verifying an item which should afterwards in the shop be buyable from others is time and cost intensive. For both there would be an improvement great.
Currently I can make a new item within a day (design till upload) but it needs more then 6 weeks to verify this item by me (if it's done in only 1 pass without failures)
(waiting till enough items are available for test order, ordering, receiving, checking, update)

would it be possible to "save a copy" of an existing item in the store? that way all attributes of that item would be already set. then as the store owner, all I'd have to do is upload the new model and i'm done. Everything from material, tags, and sometimes descriptions would be maintained. I know that would save me tons of time when I'm working.

WalshDesigns: I think you should be able to use the "Update Model" button. It allows you to simply, reupload the model in place of an existing model. Then, it keeps track of the version on the bar in the right. (it starts at 0)

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sorry, I probalby wasn't very clear. This is about saving time when creating new items in the store. I have items where the model is different, but everything else is pretty much the same. Imagine you made a dice. One dice has 6 sides on it, and another has 10 on it. If I could make a copy of the entire store entry for the first uploaded model, say it was the 6 sided dice. When I went to upload the second 10 sided dice, then all I'd have to do is change the model (like you mentioned) instead of editing a brand new page. For my idea, all the other attributes for the new, second model would be maintained becasue it's a copy of the first and would be already set. I might change the description but that's all. It saves tons of time, waiting for the browsers for every little setting we change for materials, gallerys and catagories.

This would also work, when you have an item where the only difference between the models is the wall thickness for the different materials. Say WSF, and SS. Many times I want 2 different store entries, with only the allowable material and the model itself being different. I find I don't do it sometimes, and just live with the larger wall thickness model, and then all materials work. But that's a penaltiy for the WSF buyer, where a thinner wall thickness would have worked, had I created another model, it would have thinner walls and be much cheaper for them. I'm just afraid of so many different models in the store, it's too confusing to the buyers IMHO.

A possible solution to that would be to allow one store item to have different models for the materials available to print. Then if the the store item was "Box" and you could print all the materials, but with different wall thickness, the owner would just upload the correct model that matches the material being printed. Then customers not educated on 3D printing could see the item "box", and print in the material they want, while getting the best cost possible.

In princible that could be achieved:
- each element has a button to add it as a template reference
- in "my profile" I can delete templates references and rename it when necessary
- when uploading I can select a templete reference which result in an complete take over of the attributes of the template.